Yikes, I have to create an account and subscribe to read the second half of the article? Think the complaints about that are obvious. Leaving a comment in case anyone else wants to avoid that particular experience.

Shame, it was an interesting and well written article.

Atlassian, before Atlassian, asked me to open source my wiki engine, because they wanted to create a wiki. Did that, LGPLed it, and Confluence was born ;-)

[Edit] "Engine" is ambigous, wiki render engine would be more precise [0]. To be transparent and because it is not and was not my intention to mislead people: the code was a library that rendered Wiki markup into HTML and had a plugin/extension system to e.G. render syntax highlighted code, diagrams and integrate with third party systems. It implemented this with a macro system using {...} syntax. You would need to add at least load/safe e.G. with Hibernate to have a (minimal) Wiki application. But with Radeox you could create your Wiki app in perhaps 100 LOC.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200773455_The_Radeo...

The thing that blew my mind at the time was that the initial licence was like $9, something you could throw onto your credit card as a dev and just have a heaps better way of tracking bugs.

Most of their growth playbook from back then is obsolete or basic knowledge these days.

> ... but that product had terrible support and documentation. So they decided to provide documentation and support services for it, charging customers $360 to solve their issues. However, they faced two problems: First, their documentation was so good that customers rarely needed to call them...

Interesting to see how documentation & support are such pain points to sell enterprise software, and yet how few companies manage to differentiate themselves by making truly great documentation & support experiences. Stripe is another good example

Classic survivorship bias, 100s of other startups went bankrupt and left their founders with massive high interest debt.

How do people pay the bills when they start a company? I'd go start a company right now if I could figure out how to pay my car payment while doing it.

Still not profitable after 20 years, so I wouldn't call this success.

I can make millions in revenue by selling dollar for 50c as well.

It's interesting they had "don't fuck the customer" on value list...

It's a great story, but at least in the software world, this sort of thing is exponentially more difficult to pull off today than it was 10 or 15 years ago. The internet was the most economically revolutionary invention of all time. Sell to anyone! Connect anyone in the world instantly! It created a lot of low hanging fruit. So much that it took 20 years or so to grab it all. However, in 2023, all that low hanging fruit is gone, and the market is largely saturated. A quick Google search of nearly any idea will pop up at least a handful (sometimes 30+) of established competitors fighting over scraps, none of which ever have a chance of achieving Atlassian-level success. Even B2B SAAS is reaching that saturation point. The golden age of the garage tech startup becoming a billion dollar business in a few years are probably behind us.

the headline raises important questions that we aren’t guaranteed an answer for in the article; what did revenue start at? and how much additional debt (of any kind) was incurred on the way to $20M revenue?

Strange to think of, that at some point Jira was a small dream made by a handfull of real people, labeling Jira beer at the office to give devs.

It's hated software by developers.

- Have a family that can back / help you out financially.

- Have a working spouse that can float you.

- Have funding secured BEFORE launching your startup.

- Have a solid network of friends, acquaintances, co-workers, business partners, etc. that have enough money to support you.

And so on.

Not really the best kept secret, but a LOT of startup founders come from social classes where money isn't that difficult to get. And others work in lucrative industries before launching their entrepreneurial careers.

For ages there's been this debate on being able to afford (taking) risks, which tends to be strongly correlated with your socioeconomic background.

Taking out credit-card loans, mortgaging your house, etc. def isn't the norm.

Maintain low expenses, be OK with going down in life quality, be willing to burn through your life savings and be OK if you lose it all.

I did it once, now doing it for the second time. I think most people will not bear it, but for me it feels like the only natural thing to do.

I can never imagine enjoying either running a hyper-growth VC funded company or being an employee, and I realize most people are not like that.

So on that end, maybe ask yourself if you were OK with cutting costs like losing the car, moving to a smaller apartment (even back with your parents) etc. and be happy about it even if your company flops.

Don't have car payments? Just buy a cheap or used car for cash instead of a fancy car that you can't afford.

Live below your means, so you're not stuck in working longer and longer hours just to pay for your lifestyle.

Accept help from family. If your parents have a big house, move back in with them. If your wife has a good job, ask her if she's okay with being the primary breadwinner for some time.

Build a small fraction of your company on the side, while still working as an employee.

Maybe even find some contract work to do part time.

Or find an investor who pays you a salary to work on your startup :)

Start with sales.

It may take a few of months ( <6 ) to cover your cost of living, but if you can sell, it’s readily achievable. The trick is pricing high enough to actually achieve this on 2-4 customers.

In my experience, almost all new businesses price far too low in the early days.

1) Have jobs that pay well, and do a pretty good job of saving for years and years. There are several reasons that, despite the prominence of young founders in pop culture, successful founders in fact tend to be quite a bit older—that's one of them.

2) Family money. Either have access to it directly, or be personally "poor" but with an excellent safety net in the form of rich (-enough) relatives who won't let you really suffer if things go poorly (and may help fund your business, even). Doesn't need to be, like, Rockefeller money, either—parents who can guarantee you a place to live, comfortably cover your living expenses for a while, give you the occasional four or five figure interest-free loan without putting their financial security at risk, that kind of thing, can be enough to eliminate most of the personal risk of trying to start a business.

I spent the first 15 years of my career grinding and saving cash + equity as a SWE. It turns out that some of that "worthless" startup equity eventually CAN turn in to Real Money and now I'm using it to pay my bills while I build my own thing.

Work nights and weekends until you start getting paying customers and then hopefully you can reach a point of walking away from your existing job.

I got pretty lucky with this; found a cofounder who came from money and was happy to bankroll us for 6 months until we closed our first round.